Fried brains and Sam

When last we left Sam, he had enlisted a hacker to help him bring an end to reality.

Time passed. People were fried. More time passed. The smell of bacon and tears filled the air. I’ve processed the rich and powerful, the beautiful and the obscene. I’ve worked closely with the poor and downtrodden. There are so many of those.

I used to be poor and downtrodden.

After I let the brilliant hacker Clara Reed into the highest levels of heaven, I stopped checking my clipboards and I stopped asking questions. I felt bad for being so selfish. How could I jeopardize Heaven for my own gain?

I wanted to reverse my irreversible error. So, I pondered what God would do, if God existed. I figured God had given us all a random chance at life, so I’d give people a clean and random slate in death. Hence I gave them their places in heaven arbitrarily. To prevent bias I even blindfolded myself.

Suddenly, I got through a days work faster — there was just so much less to consider. And in a snap all my moral dilemmas vanished. Poof. Vanished. I was doing the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way —arbitrarily.

My Communication Directory Specialist, Tiddo, later informed me that I had become the top producer in Earth Division. I’d never been the top producer in anything — I barely managed to produce offspring.

“Congrats,” Tiddo would say. “Congrats.”

It’d been a long time coming. But with that recognition, suddenly I enjoyed my work. Turns out, all I wanted during all my disgruntled time here was a little support, a little respect and most importantly, to feel like I mattered a little. I was almost inclined to call off my plot to transfer all of physical reality into this non-physical realm had things kept up the way they were going.

However, these suspicious notes started showing up from the Board of Review. Within the same paragraph they’d thank me for my improvement and threaten to audit me. I may have seen it coming, had I not become resigned years earlier to believe that the Board of Review was just an old boys club for fat drunkards who liked cushy government jobs. Turns out I just wasn’t flagrant enough in my violations before, which was hard to understand, given that I spent one third of my time here trying to get fired.

Luckily their audit didn’t transpire, for soon after the notes showed up, I was saved by a distinctly female voice which popped into my head.

At first I thought it was just my feminine side declaring that it had taken control of my psyche after years of brutal repression, but I quickly learned I had no control over this voice.

“You hear me now? Sammy? You there?” without pause for hours on end. I couldn’t sleep. I began to lose my sense of direction. Reality started to peel away.

Finally, having just put on my blindfold for another day’s work, I responded aloud, “What!?”

“I’m in.”

Wow. Had I known it was that easy to stop the loop, I would have spoken up sooner.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I found someone who knows something about subatomic particles.” It was Clara Reed, the world class hacker. “You’re right. You get down into it and reality is just data.” First I was briefly happy, and then I was right about something! Truly a day for the books.

“So you’ve discovered how to speak into my brain?”

“Oh yeah, my little man. And a lot more.”

“Well don’t go making a mess up there. The Board of Review is already on my ass.”

“Ha! The Board of Review has recently been dissolved.”

“Well that’s convenient.”

“I dissolved them.”

Then it hit me. I didn’t think my deal with Clara through. She could cause a whole lot of trouble up there.

“Have you tried reading those documents concerning the Lead Engineer of the Trans-Reality Travel System lately?” Clara asked with spunk.

“No.”

“Try now.”

I peeled off my blindfold and grabbed the documents off my clipboard. She’d lived up to her end of the deal. I now had Omega Sight just like God and his best Archangels, and I could read every censored word concerning the Lead Engineer.

“You’re not going to start selling this ability, are you Clara?”

“Read the documents, shithead.”

So I read.

The documents explained everything. The Engineer’s name is Nova John, he controls the suckage of black holes, and he is six times older than the universe. But most importantly, they told me where to find him — between the physical and non-physical realities.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Clara said smugly.

“It sure is.”

“You better run now. The angels are suspicious and heading for you, Sammy Boy.”

“Can’t you stop them?”

“If I’d figured out how to hack angels, rest assured I’d have other things to do than help you.”

“Fair enough.���

I flipped the switch on my control panel to turn on the conveyor belt. The gears moaned and groaned until they brought me a crossed-eyed scalper who was killed by a fangirl after she discovered the tickets he sold her were fake. I unbuckled his straps and convinced him to trade places with me. He did, but only after I gave him a quarter.

Then I strapped myself in, gave myself a 5/5, and asked the scalper to press the big red button.